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The Declining Half-Life of Secrets

And the future of signals intelligence

Policy Paper

July 23, 2015

The nature of secrets is changing. Secrets that would once have survived the 25 or 50 year test of time are more and more prone to leaks. The declining half-life of secrets has implications for the intelligence community and other secretive agencies, as they must now wrestle with new challenges posed by the transformative power of information technology innovation as well as the changing methods and targets of intelligence collection.

In the first paper in the New America Cybersecurity Fellows Paper Series, Georgia Tech professor and Alston & Bird LLP. Senior Counsel, Peter Swire, examines the implications of the changing nature of secrets for the intelligence community. Read the paper here.